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Fire Protection in Data Centres
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Fire Protection in Data Centres
Data Centres Grow Faster Than Their Fire Protection – 5 Topics for Your Agend
A data centre is in constant motion: additional racks, higher power densities, new cooling concepts, another room brought into service. The fire protection concept, however, often stays at the level of the initial installation. That is exactly where protection gaps open up – not through open flames, but through defective power supplies, overloaded cables, ageing UPS batteries and hotspots in areas that looked different at the planning stage.
Over the past months we have published several technical articles on fire protection in server rooms and data centres. This post pulls the five topics together – and links through to the detail.
The overview at a glance:
Concept: Fire safety in server rooms and data centres, planned as a whole
Detection: Early fire detection in the server room with aspirating smoke detectors
Suppression: Gas fire suppression systems in server rooms – technology, standards and planning
New requirements: Protecting AI data centres – fire safety for the next generation
In practice: LUMI Supercomputer – fire protection in the data centre
Fire protection in the data centre rests on three pillars that have to work together: structural (fire compartments, sealing of cable penetrations, room airtightness), technical (detection, alarm, control, suppression) and organisational (responsibilities, maintenance, change management, documentation).
The most common weak point is not the technology but the third pillar. After every re-cabling, compartmentalisation has to be restored; after every conversion, detection coverage and extinguishing agent quantities have to be reviewed. The reference framework is provided by VdS 6003 for IT rooms and data centres, DIN EN 50600 with its availability classes 1 to 4, and EN 54 as the European product standard for fire alarm systems.
Read the full overview of all three pillars and the relevant standards
In data centres, the cooling system works against the fire detection system. Cold aisle containment and high air exchange rates dilute smoke and carry it past the point detector on the ceiling – while the actual points of origin sit beneath the raised floor and inside the rack.
The answer is aspirating smoke detectors (internationally: Aspirating Smoke Detection, ASD). They actively draw air samples through a pipe network at several sampling points and assess the particle concentration centrally – with multiple alarm levels, typically pre-alarm and main alarm. EN 54-20 distinguishes three sensitivity classes: Class A (very high), Class B (high) and Class C (standard). Which class fits follows from the protection objective, the airflow situation and the zoning.
Aspirating smoke detectors in the server room: operating principle, EN 54-20 classes and installation location
Water is not an option in the server room: short circuits, contact corrosion and destroyed data carriers regularly cause greater secondary damage than the fire itself. This is why residue-free extinguishing gases are used – either chemical extinguishing agents ("clean agents" such as Novec 1230 or FM-200), which remove heat from the fire, or inert gases (such as Inergen, argon or nitrogen), which lower the oxygen content in the protected area.
What matters is less the gas than the design around it: a two-detector interlock instead of activation on a single signal, a defined pre-alarm time with abort and hold functions, verified room airtightness (door-fan test) and pressure relief dampers. Without sufficient airtightness the extinguishing concentration cannot be maintained – the flooding remains ineffective. The normative framework: DIN EN 15004, VdS 6003 and EN 12094-1.
Gas fire suppression in the server room: extinguishing gases, activation logic and planning checklist
GPU clusters change the starting position: power consumption of 40 kW and more per rack is many times that of conventional server racks. Air cooling alone is no longer enough – direct-to-chip and liquid cooling become a central planning factor and bring fluid-carrying lines into the protected area as a new interface: leaks, compartmentalisation, material compatibility.
At the same time, containment systems and directed airflows make detection harder, and dense rack occupancy makes localisation in an incident more demanding. The solution remains the same but is applied more rigorously: earliest possible detection, zoned suppression control and end-to-end integration into the fire alarm system. The fact that physical security is now also addressed in regulation – from KRITIS guidelines through to the NIS2 Directive – adds to the documentation requirement.
Protecting AI data centres: GPU density, liquid cooling and complianc
What this looks like in high-performance operation is shown by the supercomputer LUMI ("Large Unified Modern Infrastructure") in Kajaani, north-eastern Finland, operated by CSC – IT Center for Science. When it went online in 2022, LUMI was the fastest supercomputer in Europe and ranked third in the global TOP500 list.
Schrack Seconet equipped the data centre with the fire alarm system and took over control of the fire suppression systems – from system design through to commissioning. Characteristic features are a two-stage alarm cascade (pre-alarm for verification by the operations team, main alarm with automatic follow-up processes), a hybrid concept of inert gas in the server rooms and sprinklers in the outer areas, and a zone-based design that allows individual areas to be maintained during ongoing 24/7 operation.
LUMI case study: requirements, solution and lessons learned
The same pattern shows across all five topics. Anyone who designs fire protection once has already lost it by the next expansion. Four principles keep the concept viable:
modularity (fire alarm systems that can be extended zone by zone)
redundancy without a single point of failure
standardisation across multiple sites
remote monitoring for faster response times.
The pragmatic entry point in existing facilities costs little: inspect cable penetrations, check detection coverage against the current state of the room, update the alarm response plan, document the maintenance schedule.
Are you planning a new data centre, expanding existing server rooms, or looking to review your fire safety status? Helpful for an initial conversation:
room size and power density (current and planned)
existing detection and suppression systems (type, age, manufacturer)
relevant standards and insurance requirements
plus availability targets
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